La realidad del colectivo gitano en la España actual

In a recent study from Salzman et al. (2018) on the global state of PES schemes, the authors identified 555 active PES programs around the world, with combined annual payments over $36 billion. Furthermore, they determined that of those 555 PES schemes, 387 (70%) are watershed PES schemes, 120 (21%) biodiversity and habitat programs, and 48 (9%) forest and land-use carbon programs. None of the PES schemes identified in the study are designed for marine or coastal ecosystems, making evident a clear research and policy gap for the creation and implementation of financial incentives for these ecosystems.

To address this, I propose in this paper the creation of a new PES program for marine and coastal ecosystems, which I call the Blue Fund. The general goal of the Blue Fund is to change the behavior of any actor that has or can have a negative impact on marine and coastal ecosystems, and reward those actors that have a positive impact on these ecosystems, in order to protect, enhance or restore its ecosystem services. This financial mechanism is intended to be developed in combination or in addition to a stronger marine legislation, not instead of it. The first challenge, and opportunity, of establishing this PES scheme is that it is targeted to multiple ecosystems, which are public property, instead of only one as it is in the current PES scheme for privately owned forests. Although this Payment for Marine and Coastal Ecosystem Services can be implemented in several ecosystems, in this paper I chose coral reefs and mangroves to illustrate the general principles and steps to build such a scheme, two of the most important ecosystems in terms of the value of the benefits they provide to society (Mehvar et al., 2018).

To construct this fund, first, some key elements of any PES scheme should be described and specified under this context. Engel et al. (2008) mentions three main elements of any type of PES scheme: 1) the seller(s), 2) the buyer(s) and 3) the financial mechanism(s). According to the authors, the sellers of ecosystem services are the actors who are in a position of safeguarding the delivery of the ecosystem services, which in the vast majority of PES schemes are private landowners as in the case of the current PSA program of Costa Rica. Nevertheless, under the Blue Fund, there would be only one seller, the government, since it is the only owner of all marine and coastal ecosystems as stated in the environmental legislation of Costa Rica, creating, this way, a monopoly of marine and coastal ecosystem services.

Regarding the buyers, depending on the type of PES program, they can be the actual users of the ecosystem service as in the case of Coasean PES (i.e. user-financed), or the buyers can be others (e.g. the government or an NGO) that play a role of intermediary between the seller and the buyers, as in the case of Pigouvian PES (government-financed). In the current PES scheme of Costa Rica, the government acts as the intermediary through the National Fund for Forest Financing (FONAFIFO, by its initials in Spanish), and therefore, is the only buyer of the program, creating a monopsony. In the proposed Blue Fund, quite the opposite occurs, instead of only one buyer, there are many across different social and productive sectors in Costa Rica as well as overseas (Table 1).

Table 1. Difference in buyers and sellers in the current and proposed PES scheme.

Forests PSA Blue Fund

Buyer Government Many sectors

Seller Private land owners Government

The third key element of a PES program according to Engel et al. (2008) is the financial

mechanism per se. Here, the type of activity must be defined, in most cases being a payment to

providers for specific land uses that generate the desired ecosystem services. Furthermore, several questions must be answered, such as which activities are going to be funded, what the origin of the funds is going to be, how much to pay to those actors that have a positive impact on these ecosystems and how much to charge to those ones that have a negative impact, among others that are going to be addressed later in this section.

Six-steps method for a new PES scheme

Having described broadly the three core elements of a PES scheme and how they could operate under the Blue Fund, this section presents a general framework to design a Payment for Marine and Coastal Ecosystem Services, with a focus on mangroves and coral reefs, but the same

approach can be applied to any other marine and coastal ecosystem such as estuaries, open ocean, sea grasses, and beaches, among others.

In addition to these core elements, Farley & Costanza (2010) describe ten broader principles concerning the use of PES schemes, which are framed under "The Heredia Declaration on Payment for Ecosystem Services, “a consensus statement signed by international and local experts outlining the mechanisms for successfully implementing PES at the global, regional and local level”, product of a workshop organized in Heredia, Costa Rica, in March 2007. The ten principles are: 1) measurement, 2) bundling, 3) scale-matching, 4) property rights, 5) distribution issues, 6) sustainable funding, 7) adaptive management, 8) education and politics, 9) participation and 10) policy coherence.

These principles will be considered in the design of the proposed PES scheme here, but it is worth reflecting at this point on the tenth principle. Any PES scheme needs to form part of a coherent set of policies to address ecosystem use and management in order to be effective. Although Costa Rica has a strong environmental legislation, it lacks of a broader policy (beyond the current Forest Law where its PES scheme was created) to address in detail natural capital valuation and management, expressing the “official” definition of natural capital and ecosystem services the country wants to apply, valuation methods, and the general framework for institutions and financial mechanisms design, among many others. Therefore, ideally, before creating a new PES scheme, Costa Rica should create a “Natural Capital Management Law”.

Moreover, PES schemes can be better designed and successfully implemented if specific enabling conditions are present (which are somehow related to the ten principles cited before), such as having a strong ecosystem science, an effective way of communicating this science to the stakeholders involved in the PES program in order to promote buy-in of the project or policy, linking the ecological and social values and benefits of ecosystem services to human populations, strong existing institutions (e.g. legal frameworks, regulatory underpinnings, policy support networks, government support and public attitudes and political will, among others) to help facilitate the development of rules and management structures of the scheme, the fit of the existing governance structure with the PES structure and scale, and controllable transaction costs, to cite the most common (Huber-Stearns et al., 2017).

Regarding the actual design of the Blue Fund, the framework from Daily et al. (2009) is a good starting point to envision the logical sequence of steps to create this scheme, “it connects the science of quantifying services with valuation and policy work to devise payment schemes and management actions” (Daily et al., 2009, p. 22). The authors argue that in order to put in practice the concept of ecosystem services in decision making, one needs to understand the condition and functions of the ecosystems, which determine the ecosystem service they provide, value (not restricted to economic terms) those ecosystem services, create the institutions that will regulate the ecosystem and its services through different incentives designed to change people’s behavior when it is harmful to the environment or to enhance an already positive behavior, and finally, take the decisions to put in practice the incentives.

Forest Trends and the Katoomba Group produced in 2010 a report that broadly follows the framework of Daily et al. (2009), it is a guide to start a payment for ecosystem services scheme focused on marine and coastal ecosystems (Forest Trends & The Katoomba Group, 2010). The authors of the report used the definition of Wunder (2005), which, as has been already stated, is limited in application in schemes dealing with public goods. Nevertheless, the four-step method they present describes specific elements that are key in the design of these type of schemes and that sometimes are overlooked. The four steps are: 1) identify marine ecosystem service prospects and potential buyers, 2) assess institutional and technical capacity, 3) structure agreements and 4) implement PES agreements. For the purposes of the general process that I present here to establish the Blue Fund, step 1 is the most relevant, the rest are more focused on the administrative/management and legal factors, which are beyond the scope of this paper. A third example of conceptual and design method for payments for ecosystem services is the one presented by Lau (2013), which is focused on marine and coastal ecosystems, especially on blue carbon ecosystems, but with the goal of addressing other services in addition to carbon sequestration. The author establishes a five-step framework for this scheme: 1) identify ecosystem services and habitat of interest, and the biological and physical factors that contributes to the provision of the services, 2) identify the range of stakeholders who might be involved in the scheme, such as voluntary providers and potential buyers, 3) conduct monitoring activities to measure performance in comparison with a baseline using appropriate indicators, 4)

management activities to address specific threats (e.g. prevent deforestation, reduce habitat conversion, reduce pollution from land and habitat restoration), 5) assess the legal context for PES contracts (e.g. terms of the contract including the form of payment and conditions for compliance).

The Blue Fund has the general objective to invest public and private funds in marine and coastal ecosystem services conservation and restoration to enhance the well-being of people who depend on them. The research and policy agenda to establish this fund, consist of six steps (Figure 1), which are related somehow to the three frameworks presented before (Table 2), but they provide a more detailed overview of the science behind each step as well as the policy needs and implications. Each step contains a description and its general elements, as well as how these elements are applied in the case of a PES scheme focused on mangroves and coral reefs. It is worth noting that the information provided for these two ecosystems is an illustration of the information needed in each step, and does not pretend to be a complete assessment.

Figure 1. Steps to establish a new PES scheme for marine and coastal ecosystem services, the blue fund. This approach is not linear, it is adaptive.

Table 2. Comparison between approaches to better visualize the general elements of a new marine and coastal PES scheme.

Daily et al. (2009) _{Katoomba Group (2010)} Forest Trends and the Lau (2013) This paper

1. Understand the condition and functions of the ecosystems

1. Identify marine ecosystem service prospects and potential buyers 1. Identify ecosystem services and habitat of interest 1. Ecosystems assessment 2. Assess ecosystem

services 2. Assess institutional and technical capacity 2. Identify voluntary providers and potential buyers

2. Ecosystem services assessment

3. Value ecosystem

services 3. Structure agreements 3. Monitoring activities 3. Threats identification and prioritization

4. Create the institutions that will regulate the ecosystem and its services

4. Implement PES agreements

4. Management activities

4. Institutional design and financial mechanism 5. Legal context

assessment 5. Creation of funding sources and investment

6. Monitoring and

Adaptation

Step 1: Ecosystems assessment

The process proposed here starts with the selection of the ecosystems that are going to be subject of the PES scheme, which for the purposes of illustration, are mangroves and coral reefs. A clear understanding of the ecosystems selected is needed, taking into consideration

properties such as location, extension and health6 _{of the ecosystem. The objective of this step is}

6 _{Very often there is not data on the health of the ecosystem under assessment, or at least for its entire}

to establish a base line on the ecosystem cover and status, which is key to monitor the progress of the activities that are going to be put in place to conserve, restore and enhance the ecosystems. Furthermore, the baseline will be used to comply with the additionality and conditionality properties of a PES scheme, financing activities only if they are having a positive performance.

In the case of mangroves, in 2013 the total extension in Costa Rica was estimated in 36,250 ha (Programa REDD/CCAD-GIZ - SINAC, 2015) (Figure 2), representing 57% of its original cover as estimated in 1980 (FAO, 2007), which shows a 1.3% annual loss during that period of time. Costa Rica has extensive mangrove areas along its Pacific coastline. Here, mangrove forests are among the best developed, most diverse, and largest in Central America. They represent 99% of the total mangrove cover for the country, and consist of the following nuclear species:

Avicennia bicolor, Avicennia germinans, Conocarpus erectus, Laguncularia racemosa, Pelliciera

rhizophorae, Rhizophora mangle, Rhizophora racemosa and Rhizophora harrisonii (Kappelle,

2016).

In the north-west part of the Pacific coast mangroves tend to be smaller (up to 12 m tall in Potrero Grande, for example) possibly due to the prolonged dry season from December to April. A little further south, in more estuarine conditions, such as the mangroves of Tamarindo,

Rhizophora mangle trees can reach 25-30 m tall. The south-east of the Pacific coast has the most

extensive single area of mangroves in the deltaic system around the Térraba and Sierpe rivers (Spalding, 2010). The Atlantic coast has very different biophysical conditions, with a shoreline dominated by sandy shores and a small tidal range. The most important mangrove site here lies to the south around the Laguna de Gandoca (Spalding, 2010).

desirable information but not vital in case it is missing. The information that is strictly required in Step 1 is the location and area of the ecosystem.

Figure 2. Mangroves of Costa Rica in 2013. Source: Programa REDD/CCAD-GIZ - SINAC, 2015

Regarding coral reefs, the total cover area in the country is 970km2 _{(Spalding et al., 2001,}

UNEP-WCMC, WorldFish Centre, WRI, TNC, 2010) (Figure 3). In the Pacific coast they can be divided into four geographic groups: 1) Papagayo-Nicoya, 2) Pacífico Central, 3) Osa-Golfo Dulce and 4) offshore islands including Isla del Caño (Cortes, 2016c). In Papagayo-Nicoya, the best

studied area is Bahía Culebra, where the main reef-builders are Pavona clavus and Pocillopora

spp, and other species includes Pocillopora meandrina, Leptoseris papyracea and Fungia curvata.

In the Pacífico Central group, the greatest extension of coral reefs can be found in the Whale

Marine National Park, where Porites lobate and Pavona clavus are the main reef building species.

Coral reefs in Osa-Golfo Dulce can be found mainly in San Jocesito in the outer section of the Osa Peninsula, as well as in the shallow coasts of Golfo Dulce. Finally, perhaps the most extensive coral reefs in the country are in Isla del Caño, 15km offshore of Osa Peninsula, which are composed of twenty species of octocorals, two black corals, seventeen reef-building corals, and

four ahermatypic coral species, with Porites lobata as the predominant species (Cortes, 2016c).

Cocos Island, the country’s largest island and a world biodiversity hotspot, has extensive coral reefs, eighteen species of zooxanthellate corals and fifteen of azooxanthellates, the highest number of coral species found anywhere in Costa Rica (Cortes, 2016a). The main species of coral

Gardineroseris planulata (Cortes, 2016a). In the Caribbean coast, coral reefs are distributed in three sectors: 1) fringing reefs between Moín and Limón, 2) Cahuita National Park which has the largest fringing reef of the coast, and 3) fringing and patch reefs, carbonate banks, and an algal ridge between Puerto Viejo and Punta Mona (Cortes, 2016b).

Figure 3. Coral reefs of Costa Rica in 2001.

Source: (UNEP-WCMC, WorldFish Centre, WRI, TNC, 2010)

Step 2: Ecosystem services selection and valuation

At the core of a PES scheme is the ecosystem services that are going to be “sold”. As stated before, in the case of marine and coastal ecosystems, in Costa Rica, the government is the only seller or provider of ecosystem services since it is the sole owner of these ecosystems. Regarding the buyers or beneficiaries, they vary for each ecosystem service, and can be from a wide range of social sectors, as it is going to be explained later in this step.

Mangroves and coral reef provide many ecosystem services such as food, coastal protection, biological regulation, recreation and tourism, habitat and nursery for fishes of

commercial interest, among many others. A report from UNEP on marine and coastal ecosystems and human well-being describe these services based on the findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (UNEP, 2006). Beaudoin & Pendleton (2012) describes the most important ecosystem services from marine and coastal ecosystems, and Mehvar et al. (2018) provides the most recent review on identification and valuation of these ecosystem services (Table 3).

Table 3. Ecosystem services provided my mangroves and coral reefs, using the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment classification.

Provisioning services Regulating services Cultural services Supporting services

Food Biological regulation Cultural and amenity Biochemical

Fiber, timber, fuel* Atmospheric and _{climate regulation} Recreational Biodiversity (habitat, _nursery) Medicines, other

resources Human disease control Aesthetics Nutrient cycling and fertility

Waste processing Education and

research Flood/storm

protection

Erosion control

* Only for mangroves

Source: UNEP, 2006; Mehvar et al., 2018

Management policies for these ecosystem services vary depending on their characteristics, mainly what “type of good” is each ecosystem service, which is determined by the combination of its characteristics of rivalry and excludability. On one hand, rivalry is an innate property of the good which cannot be altered by policies or institutions, and it means in its purest form that the use of that good or service by an individual prevents its use by another individual, for example eating a banana (Daly & Farley, 2004). On the other hand, a good that is non-rival can be used by one individual without affecting significantly the use of the same good by others (Daly & Farley, 2004), as in the case of some ecosystem services such as water regulation. Nevertheless, ecosystem services such as recreation and tourism, are non-rival services but their quality can be affected by the number of its beneficiaries, and therefore, are called “congestible”,

for example when a diver is enjoying a coral reef and is accompanied by another diver, but if instead of only one extra diver there would be twenty in the same coral reef, the experience of the first diver, (and the rest of the divers) would probably be negatively affected. Finally, a good can be anti-rival when it is enhanced by its use from multiple people (e.g. information) (Kemkes, Farley, & Koliba, 2010).

The second characteristic of a good, excludability, refers to those goods that its use can be prevented through policies, institutions and technology, and therefore, is not an innate characteristic as in the case of rivalry, but most rival goods can be made excludable through institutions (Kemkes et al., 2010) like the majority of provision services such as food, medicines and wood, among others, which are rival but they need to have property rights and laws to